The processing of nails within high speed nailing machinery has at times proved troublesome. The flow of nails within such machinery has sometimes been disrupted by various mechanical interferences within the machine itself. On the other hand, the nails themselves have sometimes proved troublesome because of their inherent size variations and other imperfections which tend to defeat completely reliable automatic processing.
The above problems have been particularly noted within machines which attach heels to the bottoms of shoes in the shoe making process. In these machines, nails are typically fed from a hopper to an area wherein the nails are arranged in a predefined pattern for attachment of a heel to the shoe bottom. The thus arranged nails are subsequently driven into both the bottom of the shoe as well as the heel which has been positioned thereover. It has been noted that nails are sometimes missing from the shoe parts that have been thus nailed together. This either requires a manual correction or a complete discarding of the assembled shoe parts.